This is to confirm that you have entered 29th Hell Of The North Cotswolds on 14 April 2013. The organiser has added information that you need to know about the event, to the bottom of this email receipt. A copy of this email has been sent to the organiser, who requested that this receipt be re-sent to you.

Feel sorry for the organizer having to sort this s*** out now due that crappy website.

Right I'm going to go tweak my bike and pretend I don't have two lots of money going out the bank.

Winchcombe Cycling Club
Current situation we have asked 'Entry
Central' to suspend entries until we can
establish how many people have entered and
we will then depending on places remaining
(if there are any) device a system to allocate
any remaining.
This time last year all 1200 places were taken
in 40 minutes. this year only 300 places were
handled in the first hour.
This is a quote from 'Entry Central' an email
extract received a short while ago...
"I suggest you protect your reputation and
pull further entries, when you confirm I will
close the event. The server allows 10k
concurent connections and is not able to
handle the demand for your 1200 places.
All payments will be honoured, nobody will
be overcharged. Some shoppers will have
shadows on their accounts, but the collection
will not be made against these
authorisations"
Clearly the site was receiving over ten
thousand requests causing a total melt down
of the 'Entry Central' server.
We will review the current situation and
provide further updates within the next hour.
Thank you for your patience and we will do
our utmost to resolve this as fast as we
possibly can this end.

I feel for the Winchcombe and 'Nam CC guys, they lay on a smashing event and they've been let down by the EntryCentral hamsters.

Please, please, please let's not let the shambles with the entry system reflect badly on what is a brilliant event that raises a good chunk of cash for charity (and, no less significantly, provides a good chunk of cake for every participant)

To add some balance
The Entry Central System normally works quite well. We use it for club membership and its used extensively for tri events.
The problem is the number of hits. Given last years event was sold out in less than an hour I guess there was always a chance it would go into meltdown

we have asked 'Entry
Central' to suspend entries until we can
establish how many people have entered and
we will then depending on places remaining
(if there are any) device a system to allocate
any remaining.

Looking at the list it seems about 700 entries are on the list my brother was 306 at the time they suspended entries so I guess its slowly getting sorted and ammended, good luck. It does state the servers are capable of handling over 10000 people so I guess more than tried to register at once causing problems. Can we blame the Olympics and Brad Wiggins?

I'm one of the lucky ones - number 150 AND a confirming email. Not so lucky are all my sons and mates who were relying on my nimble fingers to sort their entries. Should I feel guilty? The real person at my bank says five payments went through, but I suspect Entry Central will only "collect" the money for entries already confirmed by email. I suspect these are the ones which remain on the published entry list.

So - what happens now? Entry Central closed the process with what looks like just over one half of the available places confirmed as sold. My guess would be that the remaining places will be allocated on the basis of the times presumably showing up on their records of when customers were bounced, although with so many of us hitting repeated requests, that could be a problem.

But why the melt-down this year? How likely is it that 10,000 plus people were all trying to enter at 12 noon? Even with last year selling out in 40 minutes, that doesn't suggest such a volume of applicants?

And why choose 12 noon on a Saturday? Maybe this was a response to presumed gripes from people in previous years who couldn't access a pc at 10:00 am on a weekday morning, which is when entries have been opened up electronically in previous years. Did no-one realise that using a weekday morning opening date would act as a volume regulator, notwithstanding it was tough on those unable to get online at that time of day?

Let's hope it's sorted soon. Dare I step away from the pc?

And what's the chance that more than a few people will be riding "independantly" in May, on the public roads and trails, forgoing the cake and medal, rather than miss out completely on something they had expected to be able to participate in?

Good evening all, apologies for the difficulties today signing up for this years HONC.
We are still waiting for a proper explanation and results from 'Entry Central' who due to massive demand were inundated and completely overwhelmed by the demand for places resulting in the entry to this years HONC being temporarily suspended.
We are working hard to resolve issues many people have had and we will do our best to communicate these as soon as we can.
Information will be available on the http://www.honc.org.uk/ web page, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WinchcombeCycleClub and Twitter @winchcombe_cc this event is run in conjunction with Cheltenham and County Cycling Club as well.
Enjoy your biking tomorrow WCC

Thank you for your patience and understanding over what has been a very difficult few days and we apologise again for the problems you have encountered.

EntryCentral have been working extremely hard over the weekend to get the system issues resolved and are now confident that they have a robust 'sign on' list, if your name is on the list your entry has been successful.

EntryCentral have stated:“Due to the problems, some users may see ‘shadow transactions’ on their cards http://www.sagepay.com/help/faq/what_is_a_shadow
these are Authorisations for which there will be no subsequent collection, and they will disappear from your statement at a time determined by your bank.”

Both we and EntryCentral are responding to individual queries a soon as we can but it will still take some time to reply to everyone

We currently have 968 sign ups and 1250 places in total will be available. We are currently reviewing the best & fairest way to reopen entries and will update this site with that information in due course

Meanwhile we are still dealing with a big volume of queries and we would ask you to please not contact us unless it is absolutely necessary.

I'm in too and very happy at that - nightmare for the HONC team with the EC system crashing - think they've done a great job in sorting out what should have been a simple process for all. Good luck to all with entries still pending.